My wife and I have a job: to help our son focus some of his energy away from being present-oriented and toward being future-oriented. It’s certainly not easy. It’s not made any easier by our many technological distractions.
An RSA video has been making the rounds of late. I ignored it for a while, but when it showed up at The Long Now Blog I finally gave it some notice. I’m glad I did. It’s a talk (with accompanying white-board illustrations) by Philip Zimbardo and it’s entitled “The Secret Powers of Time.” It’s ten minutes and I swear you can spare the time to view it.
The Six Perspectives
Mr. Zimbardo describes the six time-zomes that we frame our experiences in. Here’s my breakdown, with accompanying summary quotes:
- Past Postive
“Wasn’t the past super?” - Past Negative
“Didn’t the past suck?” - Present Hedonistic
“I live for nothing but pleasure.” - Present Fated
“We can’t control anything, so why try?” - Future Planner
“We have to work hard to make something of ourselves.” - Future Spiritual
“We have to work hard so we can die and get into heaven.”
Geographical Angle
The speaker doesn’t waste any effort in the talk’s ten minutes. While there are a slew of observations that caused me to pause and consider, one was particularly fascinating.
The more that you live in an environment where the climate doesn’t change (i.e. – you’re close to the equator) you tend to imagine sameness rather than change. These cultures tend toward living in states #3 and #4 – the present-tense.
An example is Mr. Zimbardo’s home of Sicily. After a past talk, he was approached by a poet. This poet noted that there is no future-tense verb in Sicilian. To put it another way, there was a thing, and there is a thing, but there is no will be. It’s simply not a part of the mental framework.
Study and Work Hard
And this brings me back to my parenting role. The role of schools is to help present-oriented kids evolve into future-oriented adults. I recognize there is no innate superiority of one over another, but my life is peppered with individuals that didn’t do anything with their life and now skate the line between the living world and that of self-inflicted-gunshot-wound-to-the-head.
As we grow older, it’s very hard to gain social approval for present-oriented hedonism. Don’t be a child. Act your age. Do something. And a million similar aphorisms. Such statements are so common that we hardly appreciate that they are linguistic artifacts from a very particular tradition: We’re in the longitudinal-north and descended from a Protestant tradition.
So my wife and I battle against the 10,000+ hours our kid will have played video games. My son battles against the tendency to be utterly bored with school. We try to make him aware, but once again life appears to be a crap shoot.
There are a million ways this could turn out. It’s no wonder we love playing silly games. Seen at a particular angle, life really is a game. But we’d better get good at it.
